Cristian Mungiu has been harassed, since 2022, by a woman with mental disorders, who filed several lawsuits accusing him of “filming her with drones” in public places.
Cristian Mungiu is being harassed through the courts by a woman with mental problems, from Bucharest, who claims that the director is filming her “with drones” and that she was included in a film project without her consent.
While his name is back in the foreground after his second Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, it is less well known that director Cristian Mungiu has been dealing with a situation unrelated to cinematography for almost three and a half years.
According to the documents consulted by ziaruldeiasi, the famous Romanian director is targeted from 2022 by a series of lawsuits initiated by a woman from Bucharest, identified in the documents by the initials GIA, who developed a true obsession with him and who claims that she has been followed and filmed by him since 2018.
The first trial was opened in December 2022, at the Bucharest Court, where the woman asked for moral damages of approximately 10,000 euros. In the application submitted to the file, she claimed that she was being filmed without consent in public spaces and that the images were taken with drones.
Specifically, the woman asked the court to compel the director to pay compensation “for his act of forcibly filming her on certain streets when the floodlights are on and there are a lot of drones in those areas since 2018 (…) every time she leaves the house, even in certain shops, she is filmed from several sides by the drones of the director Mungiu Cristian without wanting this”.
During the trial, the woman brought other accusations, just as bizarre, such as that she had become, without knowing and without giving her consent, part of a cinematographic project of Cristian Mungiu, which had been going on for several years and that she would have been “bound” to participate in it.
In the documents submitted to the file, the plaintiff stated that the director “subjected her to forced labor from 2018 until now, working on a serial film without her consent and without an employment contract. An autobiographical serial film is being produced together with her parents (…) but also with her neighbors since 2018, since she has been working on these live broadcasts she has been forced to wear headphones, she has been exposed to very loud noises and partially lost her hearing, having been diagnosed this year with mixed bilateral hypoacusis and currently wearing hearing aids”.
In the same action, the woman also claimed that she could not renounce her alleged involvement in the project “because there is no employment contract and she does not have access to production information.”
Cristian Mungiu wins the big Palme d’Or trophy at the Cannes Film Festival with the film “Fjord”
“I want him to stop working on this serial film, but without an employment contract I cannot ask for resignation, salaries, access to labor protection, or information about the workplace. Even if I will not have seniority on the labor market and I will not be entitled to back wages, I am asking the court to order the termination of this production, about which the director does not want to give me details”. she requested in court.
The Bucharest Court rejected the request in June 2023, but the woman appealed in 2024 to the Bucharest Court of Appeal, which definitively rejected her action.
“However, beyond the general and unproven nature of this statement, such a situation, even if it were real, does not represent forced labor, not identifying the specific elements of an employment relationship, namely the provision of work by an employee for and under the authority of an employer, nor the will of the employer to subject a certain person to work for his benefit by coercion”, the magistrates reasoned.
Although she definitively lost the first trial, the woman continued the proceedings.
In August last year, she opened a new case at the Constanța Court, again requesting compensation and resuming the accusations of alleged filming without consent.
Among the most recent claims is that it was filmed in a dental office in Constanța county.
On her social media accounts, the applicant published “copies” of documents from the file and repeated the accusations against the director. From the same documents it appears that he sent petitions including to the Government of Romania and to the European Court of Human Rights.
In one of the published documents, the name of lawyer Ionuț Cristian Cazan appeared as the director’s legal representative. Contacted by the press, the lawyer stated that he did not know the file and that he was not employed by Mungiu.
Other targets: HBO Romania, PRO TV and a psychiatrist
The director is not the only person who has become the target of these accusations. In other lawsuits opened by the same woman, HBO Romania, PRO TV, and a psychiatrist from Bucharest also appear.
In the case of the doctor, the plaintiff requested compensation of 50,000 euros and claimed that she had been subjected to “on a continuous basis, starting from September 1, 2018, of physical and mental torture through the use of artificial intelligence, as well as exposure to radiation.”
In the answer submitted to the court, the doctor explained that the woman was consulted in his office in 2017, being brought by her parents, and the diagnosis established then was “persistent delusional disorder”, for which he recommended antipsychotic treatment. He stated that, apart from the consultations that year, he had no other interactions with the applicant.
This lawsuit was also lost, but a new case was later opened.
Recently, the woman was criminally investigated for carrying or using dangerous objects without the right, but the prosecutor dropped the criminal prosecution, and the solution was confirmed by the court at the end of March 2026.
